Keywords are the words or phrases search engine users use to find content online. While analyzing keywords we have to select a handful of right keywords from thousands of related keywords we get. Unlike PPC in Search Engine Optimization we have to be very careful while finding out the right keywords that we will target, as all the SEO work is done for selected handful of keywords and also because we have to be sure that we are bringing the right type of visitors to your website. This process of selecting a few target keywords is called Keyword Analysis and is the most basic aspect of any SEO campaign. As such everything right from content on landing pages to back links are created keeping these keywords in mind. Keyword research is the first step of our SEO strategy. Understanding which keywords are right for you and how they can maximize your ROI is the basic essence of any SEO campaign. As the complete SEO strategy revolves around keyword strategy, we have to keep upgrading it as and when we achieve the set targets. As keywords drive the whole SEO campaign, they have to be perfect. The three major aspects of keyword analysis which we evaluate are Relevance, Search Volume and Competition. We need the right visitors for your website, therefore relevance plays a key role in determining the keywords. While on one hand targeting only the keywords with low search volume would be less fruitful, on the other hand targeting just the highly competitive keywords at the beginning of a campaign can lead to disastrous results as well. We have to be practical while setting our goals, therefore we keep a mix of long tail and short tail keywords. We need a very good strategy and have to think from the point of view of a search engine user. Will the search engine user find what he is looking for and will he or she like reading your web page? Exactly how much relevant the content on this page is to the selected keywords for that page? These are some common questions which we have to answer before selecting a keyword. We have to dig very deep into the goods or services that you wish to target. Selecting the right niche keywords can bring in quick results and thus a higher ROI.

According to Google, for a typical query, there are thousands, even millions, of web pages with potentially relevant information. As search engine users we just want the right pages with great content and not any irrelevant results. Google too wants to serve only useful and relevant results, not billions of web pages. So to help rank the best pages first, Google writes algorithms to evaluate how useful these web pages are. It is this "usefulness" that we as SEO experts have to capitalize on. If we are able to create original content that Google feels is much more useful than other relevant content available online, then we have already won half the battle. But this is so much easier said than done. A lot of research goes in writing good content, imagine the kind of research required to write great content. But there's another catch to it, half of the battle doesn't end here. It's not just the quality but the quantity of content too that matters. Depending on the keyword competition, besides content on target pages good SEO content strategy would require many more pages of high quality, original and relevant content throughout the website.

Competitor analysis is the process of analyzing the SEO strategies used by key competitors for competing keywords. It also involves determining which keywords your competitors are ranking for and then reverse engineering to find out the missing SEO aspects in your website. We analyze many SEO factors of every website and web page featured on the first page of Google SERPs. These include SEO factors like, Link Profile Strength, Web page & Website Content, Keyword Density, On Page Optimization, Structured data markup, User Experience, Mobile Friendliness, Website Page Speed analysis, Social Media strength, and Internal Linking. As such Competitor Analysis is part of Keyword Research & Analysis. At the time of finalizing the keywords, competitor analysis becomes utmost important. Why? Because when we optimize a website for a particular keyword we need to figure out what is working right for the top position holders for those keywords. You see SEO is mix of various online marketing activities, and depending on the keyword competition and the current search engine value of a website, we have to carve out a path that will lead to your sureshot search engine success. Another important reason for competitor analysis is that occasionally we start chasing keywords that don't have high ROI. We need to avoid such instances and target the keywords that drive both visitors & conversions in a certain time period.

We all know what are back-links, but not all of us know their importance. Google wants to serve authoritative web pages to its users and back-links are the single most important factor that helps build you websites' authority. Therefore good back-links will help you get ranked and without back-links, it is hard to rank for even the simplest keywords. When SEOs came to know about this fact they started misusing it and creating spam links. All this messed up the search engine results. As search engines got smarter at fighting spam link building campaigns, it was natural links that emerged as the true winner. But the distinguishing line between natural and unnatural links became too thin. The bottom line, if you want to rank high you need quality back links. Another reason why back-links are so dear to search engines, is that software like Googlebot finds new web pages with the help of back-links. So the more you are linked the better chances your web page will be found naturally by Googlebot.

Google keeps updating its search algorithms to maintain the quality of search engine results. While a large number of such updates are minor, there are number of other updates that have a significant impact on search results, such as, Google Hummingbird, Google Mobile Friendly, Google Panda, Google Penguin and Google Pigeon. Google publically informs about most of these significant updates on their various webmaster networks. When we strategize the SEO campaign we keep a close eye at any (positive or negative) relation between such updates and your website. Just looking at how Google treats your website post these updates we can better evaluate the exact positive or negative aspects of your website in light of the specific update. For example if your website was negatively affected by Google Penguin, we know that there was something wrong with your back links and that we need their thorough evaluation.

When search engines such as Google says that relevance is a key important factor in ranking a page, they are mostly talking about on-page SEO factors. While relevant back-links are certainly important, it is only because of their connection to the on-page SEO factors. So what are these on-page SEO factors? These include Title Tag, URL, Heading tags, Images, Videos, Info graphics, Keyword density, Keyword occurrence, mobile friendliness, Outbound links, Internal links, Page speed, Keyword synonyms, Image optimization, Length & quality of content, original content, Meta tags, Important HTML tags related to the semantics of your web page, such as em & strong, breadcrumbs, additional markup such as schema and rich snippets. When we optimize a website we optimize each and every on-page element for all the target pages. In fact in the first month itself we will complete all these on-page SEO activities.

User experience refers to the kind of experience your website visitors have when they visit your website. In addition to helping users take necessary actions in order to achieve your business goals, a good user experience will also allow your website visitors to easily find whatever they are looking for. Your website layout, its page speed, the colors, images, content and forms, all play a major role in achieving a good user experience. The eight main aspects of creating a great user experience include User Research, Usability Evaluation, Information Architecture, User Interface Design, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Content Strategy and Accessibility.

According to Google "Mobile is critical to your business and will continue to be so". SEO experts had realized very early that in the world of Search Engines, trend was clearly going in the favor of mobile devices. People had started to search more often on mobile devices than on desktops. The ease of using Mobile Search had led to a mobile search revolution. As the trend picked up Google began rolling its global mobile friendly update on 21 April, 2015, thereby improving the rankings of mobile-friendly pages in mobile search results. Often users had to pinch and zoom in order to read content on a web page. Common mobile user experience issues included, Touch elements being too close, Small font size, Wrong view port settings, Blocked JavaScript, CSS and Image Files, Unplayable Content, Faulty Redirects, Mobile-Only 404s, Irrelevant Cross Links and Overlays that partially or completely cover the contents of the page.

Page speed is an important ranking signal. This means that if all other factors remain same, your website could perform better or worse in Google Search just depending on your page speed. We use tools such as Page Speed Insights to measure and optimize page speed of all target pages.

Google had seriously started emphasizing on Page Speed from the year 2009. It had mentioned several times across their Webmaster blog posts about their own research on page speed and indicated just how much obsessed Google is with your website speed. Here is an excerpt from one of their blog posts "Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."

Social Media channels such as Facebook can be easily gamed, hence they are not regarded as a direct ranking signal. However their importance shouldn't be underestimated. Google has gotten smarter at distinguishing between profiles with genuine and fake followers. This is why we often see social media pages with genuine likes and followers rank high in Google and web sites with a strong social media presence also have a better scope at ranking higher. There are various reasons that go in favor of social media. First, as social media websites are all about connecting with other people they have huge potential for quality back links, second, social media sites are great place to share high quality useful content, third, social media sites can be very useful when it comes to creating or promoting a brand, fourth, with billions of users channels such as Facebook and Youtube can help quickly build a very huge audience, fifth, social media links are also back links, so at the end of the day when you are seriously promoting your content on social media channels, you are in itself creating links for you website.

Google Analytics is an awesome tool for measuring & tracking your website visitors. You can see which keywords are performing, how your organic and all other visitors are behaving and which are the main landing pages, so you can optimize them to their fullest capabilities. It's an easy to use ultrafast tool that helps you gain advance insights and create all sorts of reports about your site visitors. In short, a must have tool for online marketing.

Here's what Google says about Analytics "Whatever your industry – travel, automotive, healthcare, or beyond – Analytics helps you get a deeper understanding of your customers so you can deliver better experiences and drive results. Analytics makes it easy to understand how your site users are engaging with your content, so you know what’s working and what’s not. See how people are interacting with your sites and the role that different channels play by viewing robust reports and dashboards. You can even connect systems used to measure CRM, points of sale, and other touch points with your customers for a more complete view. Use Google’s unique machine learning capabilities to discover new insights from your data — such as which users are likely to convert or which customers have high revenue potential."

Google Search Console is the number #1 SEO tool.

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site's presence in Google Search results. You don't have to sign up for Search Console for your site to be included in Google's search results, but doing so can help you understand how Google views your site and optimize its performance in search results. Some benefits of using Search Console are, It helps you monitor your site's performance in Google Search results, Makes sure that Google can access your content, Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don't want shown in search results, Create and monitor content that delivers visually engaging search results, Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance, Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean, Discover how Google Search—and the world—sees your site, See which queries caused your site to appear in search results, See a sample of sites which are linking to your website.

A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. Also, your sitemap can provide valuable metadata associated with the pages you list in that sitemap: Metadata is information about a webpage, such as when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and the importance of the page relative to other URLs in the site

Internal links are links pointing to other pages within your website. Their basic benefits include, first and foremost internal links are great for user experience. As website users can easily jump to more relevant content using these links they become a great source to grip your site visitors. This is the exact strategy used by Wikipedia. Second, internal links pass on the link juice across all your internally lined pages. Third, as we have full control over our internal links they become a great source to build up the relevancy quotient for pages that other sites might not link to. Fourth, internally linked pages can be found by Googlebot and are thus easily crawled and indexed by Google. When done right Internal Links transform into a very powerful SEO tactic that has unthinkably huge benefits.

The web is like an ever-growing library with billions of books and no central filing system. Google uses software known as web crawlers to discover publicly available webpages. Crawlers look at webpages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web. They go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to Google’s servers. The crawling process begins with a list of web addresses from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners. As Google crawlers visit these websites, they use links on those sites to discover other pages. The software pays special attention to new sites, changes to existing sites and dead links. Computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often and how many pages to fetch from each site. When crawlers find a webpage, Googles' systems render the content of the page, just as a browser does. It takes note of key signals — from keywords to website freshness — and keeps track of it all in the Search index. The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.